Treading a path
well worn by Clinton and Bush before him, President Obama has eagerly picked up
the war baton, and is enthusiastically waving it at Pyongyang North Korea
Despite all
of the press coverage and all of the politicians warmongering speeches, very
little truth has been uttered, and to date many American workers are probably
very much in the dark about what is really happening in Northeast Asia . What are Washington U.S. North Korea North Korea
To
understand the current conflict, you have to understand something about Korea
For
centuries, the Koreans have fought to free their country from the rule of their
more powerful neighbors, namely China Japan China Japan
This brutal
occupation was met by a number of popular rebellions, that unfortunately were
all ultimately unsuccessful.
In 1925, in
the wake of the inspiring Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the Korean resistance
gave birth to an embryonic communist movement.
Forced to work underground, many of its early activists were killed by
the Japanese occupiers. The brutal
repression by the authorities forced the young communist movement to take up
arms in self-defense. Small bands of
revolutionaries around the country came together to try and defend their
communities, and from time to time to strike out at police and military
installations. The Japanese response was
to organize sweeping military offensives that drove many of these
revolutionaries to the far north of the country, and over the border into
neighboring Manchuria – a region in China
While
hundreds of thousands of Koreans found themselves in Manchuria , it provided no refuge, as the
advancing Japanese imperialists were hot on their heals. Using the deposed ruling family of the old
Chinese empire as their puppets, the Japanese set up a puppet state in Manchuria that they dubbed Manchukuo Manchukuo
The Korean
resistance to Japanese occupation though continued, both within the Korean
peninsula, and in Manchuria . Within Manchuria Korean
communists, soon found themselves not only hounded by the Japanese, but also
often by the Chinese Communists, who looked on Koreans as possible
collaborators of the Japanese, and who killed thousands of them in various
purges. Despite this, the Stalin led
Communist International insisted that the Korean communists submit to the
leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and as a result the bands of Korean
resistance fighters in Manchuria came under Mao Zedong’s nominal control.
One of the
most important leaders of these Korean resistance bands was Kim Il-Sung – the
future leader of North Korea
By the end
of the 1930s Kim Il-Sung, and most Korean communist leaders, found themselves
forced to take refuge in Soviet Siberia after a series of massive Japanese
military offensives against them. Here
the Korean fighters would sit out most of the rest of the Second World War, as
the Soviets were hesitant to anger the Japanese by letting the Koreans use the
USSR as a base of operations. Not until
the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August of 1945 did Kim Il-Sung and
company get to cross the border again, and then it was as part of the baggage
train of the Soviet armies that quickly occupied Manchuria and the northern
part of the Korean peninsula in the final few weeks of the war before Japan
surrendered.
Creation of North Korea
Once the
war ended, the Allied powers decided to divide the Korean peninsula between the
North, which would be occupied by the Soviets, and the South, that would be
occupied by the United States. No
consideration was given to the will of the Korean people, and despite their
decades of heroic resistance against the Japanese, they weren’t even nominally
consulted on the matter.
Both the
Soviets and the U.S. quickly set about creating puppet governments in their new
protectorates. Unlike the U.S. though,
the Soviet army soon withdrew from North Korea, leaving a new regime headed by
Kim Il-Sung in place.
Kim
Il-Sung’s regime in many ways resembled the new Stalinist regimes in Eastern
Europe. Ostensibly they were multi-party
“people’s democracies” in which the Communist Parties were simply part of
coalition governments, but in reality the Stalinists were in firm control. The other parties that made up the North
Korean government, such as the Chongdois Chongu Party and the Social Democratic
Party were soon reduced to hollow shells
with little autonomy and even less influence.
They became little more than window dressings. Similarly, within the Korean Communist Party
(later renamed the Korean Workers’ Party), Kim Il-Sung quickly pushed out any
potential rivals and assumed undisputed control of the party and the
government.
Despite the
growing repressiveness of the Stalinist regime in the North, the Communist
Party continued to have broad support in the U.S. puppet state in the
South. The Communist Party counted
hundreds of thousands of members and sympathizers, and despite the U.S.
occupiers best efforts to ban and repress the party, it continued to grow. Already beginning in 1945 it was organizing
armed resistance in a number of parts of the country. Some of these guerilla battles involved more
up to tens of thousands of South Korean revolutionaries taking on U.S.
occupation forces and attacking pro-Japanese landlords and other collaborators.
Back in the
North, with Stalin’s active support, Kim Il-Sung was rapidly building up his
military forces. In 1950, in a bid to
re-unite the Korean people, the North Korean army invaded the South. This attack come on the heals of a series of
skirmishes and incursions between the North and South Korean militaries. At the same time the North invaded, hundreds
of thousands of South Koreans rose up against the U.S. occupation. The result was the near total collapse of the
Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul which was forced to flee while the U.S. military itself
was nearly ejected from the peninsula.
Within the span of only a few weeks U.S. forces had been pushed back to
a tiny corner of the peninsula around the city of Pusan.
While one
can criticize the tactics used by the North Koreans to re-unify their people,
the fact remains that re-unification was nearly universally supported. The Syngman Rhee regime, comprised of
numerous Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation, was extremely
unpopular. It ruled only through U.S.
military backing. The rejection of the
majority of the South Korean people of this state of affairs was powerfully
demonstrated by the popular uprising in support of the Northern invasion, and
the large scale defections of many South Korean soldiers to the North.
The will of
the Korean people however mattered little to the imperialists holding court in
Washington D.C. President Truman and his
generals quickly mobilized reinforcements for the beleaguered troops trapped in
Pusan, and then launched a massive amphibious landing behind North Korean
lines, forcing the North Koreans to retreat.
The U.S. military, joined by a number of other pro-imperialist armies
(British, South African, Turkish, French, Canadian, Australian, Greek, Dutch, Thai,
Belgian, New Zealander, Luxembourgian, Columbian, Ethiopian and Filipino) under
the guise of the United Nations, pursued the North Koreans past the former
border and into the North. Aided by
devastating carpet bombings and massive use of napalm, the United Nations
forces literally devastated the North.
Its cities were literally leveled – with whole neighborhoods left with
no buildings standing. Tens of thousands
were killed, and hundreds of thousands fled in terror before the advancing U.N.
forces.
Intending
to completely conquer North Korea, the imperialists were dealt a stunning blow
in 1951 when an army of Chinese soldiers came to the aid of the North Koreans,
and changed the course of the war yet again.
U.S. and U.N. forces were pushed back down the peninsula, back to a line
near the original border – where the war would drag on for another two years in
the form of bloody trench warfare.
In the end
the imperialists had to cry “uncle” and agree to a ceasefire. This represented a partial victory for the
Korean people – but the cost in lives and destruction had been astronomical –
the peninsula and its people were left divided.
In the wake
of the war, the U.S. poured significant resources into rebuilding South Korea,
and supported a string of brutal dictators who vigorously repressed the labor,
socialist and student movements. The
North Koreans, in comparison, received far less reconstruction aid from the
Soviets and Chinese. Nevertheless the
North was able to slowly rebuild.
Benefiting from having most of the peninsula’s mineral resources, and
having been the site of most of the industries that the Japanese had built
during their occupation, the North Korean economy was able to boast
significantly higher growth and output compared to the South throughout the
50s, 60s and into the 1970s.
During this
time North Korea as also careful to remain neutral in the political rift that
developed between the Chinese and Russian Stalinists during the Sino-Soviet
split that began in the late 1950s.
It was
during this time that Kim Il-Sung and his co-horts first put forth their famous
“Juche” theory in 1955. Juche preached
self-reliance and independence at all costs. It made a virtue out of autarky.
While initially it was described as a Korean addition to Marxist thought, by
1972 Kim Il-Sung replaced all references to Marxism-Leninism in North Korea’s
constitution with Juche, and it was soon described as having “superceded”
Marxism-Leninism. While still referring
to themselves as socialists, the North Korean Stalinists rejected Marxism and
Leninism as European notions. In essence
Juche became the ideological framework for a particularly nationalistic, and
even xenophobic, form of Stalinism.
Despite
what it called itself though, North Korea remained a degenerated workers’
state. Capitalism had been expropriated,
but the workers had been denied democratic control of the society by a
self-serving, parasitic bureaucracy surrounding Kim Il-Sung.
North Korean Famine
By the
1980s it had become clear that South Korea had economically surpassed North
Korea. By brutally repressing labor and
students, often at the point of gunpoint, the South Korean ruling class had
succeeded in turning their country into an up and coming economic power – one
of the so called “Asian Tigers”. South
Korean capitalists, taking advantage of cheap labor, generous U.S. aid and
Japanese investment, were able to become major producers in the field of steel,
ship building, automobiles and electronics, among other things.
Meanwhile
North Korean industry was unable to advance beyond a 1960s level of
technology. Internationally isolated,
things went from bad to worse when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of
1991. Cut off from the subsidized oil
that the Soviets had provided, energy poor North Korea went into a serious
crisis. Many factories were idled for
lack of energy, and electricity blackouts became common. Agriculture was similarly affected by a
decrease in the amount of fertilizer and other chemical inputs that North
Korea’s failing industries were able to provide. But these problems would be dwarfed by the
natural disasters that were to follow.
In 1995 a
devastating series of floods destroyed thousands of acres of crop land, knocked
out roads, dams and railroad tracks.
There was a drop of 50% to 75% in the nation’s harvest, and matters were
made worse by an ensuing drought. Food,
which had already become scarce in the early 90s as a result of the economic
crisis, now became almost impossible to obtain.
By 1996 the country was in the grips of full on famine, and it’s
estimated that between 1996 and 1999 anywhere from 200,000 to 3 million people
died.
The
response of the international community was slow and woefully inadequate. The U.S. likes to brag that when news of the
famine hit, only China stepped forward and offered more aid. Given that the total amount of aid given in
1995 amounted to only $8 million dollars, less then the cost of half a dozen
cruise missiles, the U.S. should be ashamed.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the slow and checkered reaction of
the imperialists to this devastating human catastrophe was clearly a case of
using food as a weapon.
Nuclear & Missile Stand Off
Kim
Il-Sung, who had ruled North Korea since its founding, died in 1994 at the
beginning of the crisis. He was
succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Il, who continued his father’s absurd cult of
personality which reached such extremes that it would have made even Joseph
Stalin or Mao Zedong blush.
Kim Jong-Il
inherited a state in near total economic ruin.
The state run economy had broken down to such a point that the state no
longer even bothered to try and nationally distribute food, requiring instead
that each local area become completely self-sufficient in food production or
starve.
Kim
Jong-Il’s response to this crisis was to rely almost exclusively on the
military. He put forth a new ideology
called Songun. Songun, which is meant to
supercede the old Juche philosophy, is based on the notion that the military,
not the working class, is the revolutionary foundation of the state, and that
all resources necessary should go to it.
It was
during this time that North Korea began to accelerate its nuclear program. Begun in 1980s with a small Soviet research
reactor, the North Koreans went on to build their own primitive reactor in
Yongbyon in an attempt to reduce their need to import petroleum.
It was also
during this time that the North Korean regime dramatically ramped up its arms
sales. North Korea had built up a
significant arms industry way back in the aftermath of the Korean War. While much of their output was of obsolete
Soviet and Chinese designs, much of it reverse engineered with little support
from either, they came to produce a wide range of military equipment – from small
arms all the way up to tanks and even submarines. They also succeeded in reverse engineering
old Soviet Scud missiles, from which they went on to produce a whole family of single
and multi-stage missiles.
While crude
by modern standards, North Korean missiles were cheap, and available to any
regime willing to pay for them. As a
result, during the 1990s the North Koreans became one of the world’s leading
exporters of short and medium range ballistic missiles, with many of them going
to countries on the U.S. bad side, like Iran and Syria.
The
combination of North Korea developing a nuclear industry, together with
ballistic missiles, sent Washington into a tizzy. Nothing infuriates imperialists more than
when third world countries dare to arm themselves with weapons that might
actually be able to deter imperialist bullying.
Despite the fact that the U.S. has for decades openly kept nuclear
weapons in South Korea, and on naval vessels in the region, the U.S.
hypocritically denounced the North Koreans for their nuclear program.
The North
Koreans insisted that they had the right to defend themselves, and indicated
that what they were after was a non-aggression pact from the U.S., a nuclear
free Korean peninsula, and energy aid.
For our
part, Socialist Action agrees that North Korea has the right to develop nuclear
energy, and nuclear weapons for the matter, as much as we find both things
distasteful. Given the threat that the
U.S. poses, North Korea has the right to defend itself, and to create a
deterrent to possible aggression.
The
imperialists could not disagree more though!
They cried bloody murder. After a
whole series of United Nations resolutions and attempts to further isolate
North Korea economically and diplomatically, in 1994 the Clinton administration
however agreed to sit down with the North Koreans and work out a
compromise. Frustrated by its inability
to stop the North Korean regime, the U.S. imperialists offered them a deal. In exchange for shutting down their nuclear
reactor, and agreeing to allow inspectors in, the U.S. would provide a certain
amount of petroleum and assistance in providing alternative nuclear technology
that could be used for generating electricity, but not weapons grade material.
This deal
held for several years, but then the U.S. broke the deal. It began to reduce the amount of oil
delivered to North Korea, Then under the Bush administration the spigot was
eventually cut off completely. The North
Koreans then restarted work on their reactor, and in 2006 tested a nuclear
bomb.
What has
followed since then has basically been a broken record where the U.S. screams
and hollers, and the North Koreans holler back.
Very little new is ever said or proposed. Since 2009
the North Koreans have tested another bomb, and have test fired a number of
missiles, and the U.S. has responded with more efforts to tighten the noose
around North Korea’s neck.
The U.S. Campaign Against North
Korea
The recent
escalation has resulted in the U.S. and U.N. saying that they will begin
boarding and searching North Korean ships suspected of transporting arms for
export, which the U.N. sanctions now prohibit.
The North Koreans have stated that any boardings of its ships will be
taken as a declaration of war.
Meanwhile
back home, American workers are being fed a steady diet of anti-North Korean
horror stories. While careful to never
mention the U.S. violations of its agreements with North Korea, or the presence
of U.S. nukes in the region, we hear a steady torrent of stories about North
Korea’s threats and deceptions. A
considerable degree of fear is being drummed up about North Korean missiles,
and a possible nuclear attack, reminiscent of the war mongering carried about
against Iraq in 2001, and against Iran today.
Also,
the capitalist press has taken a particular fancy to running stories about the
personal life and lifestyle of Kim Jong-Il.
We have been regaled with stories ranging from his alleged love for
orgies and Swedish blondes, to claims that he is personally the world’s largest
purchaser of Hennessey brandy. Some of
these stories are rather dubious – (The Hennessey brandy claim is
questionable. North Korea is one of the
few nations that still maintains an old tradition of giving and expecting
expensive gifts during diplomatic missions, and as such it imports a
considerable amount of luxury wines and other goods that it then givens out as
gifts to foreign leaders and diplomats on their birthdays, or on other special
occasions. This is a more likely explanation
of North Korea’s brandy imports than some insatiable appetite for it by Kim
Jong-Il). It’s worth keeping in mind
that one of the stock and trades of U.S. imperialism is to demonize the leaders
of rival nations. And at the end of the
day, regardless of whether these stories are true of not, they are a
distraction from the real issues, and in no way constitute a legitimate justification
for Washington’s unrelenting campaign against North Korea.
There is no denying the
fact that North Korea is indeed a brutal Stalinist dictatorship that represses
its own people and puts the interest of the ruling bureaucracy and its armed
forces above all else. Nevertheless, it
is not the job of the United States to police the Korean peninsula. The world's major manufacturer, distributor
and user of weapons of mass destruction, of the nuclear, chemical and
biological varieties, has no standing in our view to make demands on any
nation. It has no right to dictate the
internal policy of any country, period. Only the Korean people themselves have
the right to determine their country’s policies, and overthrow their government
– both North and South. It is the Korean
people alone who can create a just solution to the problems they face, on both
sides of the DMZ.
And it also needs to be
pointed out that not only does U.S. imperialism not have the right to
intervene, but that its bully tactics are not meant to improve the lot of the
Korean people, or protect them from nuclear war. Rather its policies are geared towards
increasing its own power and position in East Asia to the detriment of the
working people of the region.
While we do not lend any
political support to the North Korean regime, Socialist Action unconditionally
defends North Korea against any and all U.S. aggression. We reject the notion
that imperialism has any role to play what so ever in the region. We call on all anti-war activists to join us
in opposing all U.S. and U.N. military, economic and diplomatic moves against
North Korea. Hands Off North Korea! Self-determination for the Korean People!
No comments:
Post a Comment